Lighting Up the Last Mile: Fibre Optics are the Way Forward

[mgcarley]

I was watching Australia Network and they were discussing about India.
I remember them saying, India is a vast country...
It is quite a challenging task for any telecom company to cover the entire country , even for teh Government itself.
This is one reason wireless networking is booming in India.
As a matter of fact people are already leaning towards 3G and assuming it as a broadband alternative.
But, is it possible for wireless networking to actually take place of wired broadband in India? was just thinking..
erm sorry for going off topic.

Look at the state of 3G (even in it's infancy) and Wimax in India. Personally, I think the question answers itself.

---------- Post added at 06:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:33 PM ----------

...Australia is also a vast country, but they're doing fine. A lot like NZ - lots of retail competition, most of the providers offer basically full-speed ADSL where customers pay only for data, a bit of cable, a bit of wireless, decent enough speeds.

They're doing some great stuff with Wireless broadband over VHF signals too. I'd like to see something like that in India (for rural areas only, not urban) - it seems that this is one technology where the speed doesn't degrade (as much) over the distance and still offers half decent performance to rural areas.

 

[devx101]

^^^ well LTE advanced may be a solution though still in the pipeline. Theoretical its 1Gbps so u can at least expect 100-200 Mbps.

 

[mgcarley]

^^^ well LTE advanced may be a solution though still in the pipeline. Theoretical its 1Gbps so u can at least expect 100-200 Mbps.

It's a while off - despite it being spec'd at 1Gbit/s, they're not getting anywhere near it.

Besides, that still relies on the provider to be running fiber up to the LTE base station which is running at 1Gbit/s or more - providers simply aren't doing that. Whether they own or lease, the companies are usually putting in point to point connections (as in, telco office to cell tower) at rated port speeds rather than letting it go at whatever the wire will handle.

Variety of reasons for this - some of which I understand, others I don't.

 

[devx101]

so the cell towers are not connected to the backbone in a proper way....perhaps that why we don't get full speeds from our 3G devices..

 

[mgcarley]

so the cell towers are not connected to the backbone in a proper way....perhaps that why we don't get full speeds from our 3G devices..

That depends on the network planning. I'm sure they were connected with sufficient capacity according to specifications that they could have garnered from providers overseas, but, what we have to understand is that due to the urban densities found in India, I think that every case study, every example, every implementation that the Indian telcos had available to study was practically useless.

You'd never get full speed out of a 3G device anyway simply because of the doppler effect (if you're moving) and distance from the tower degrades the signal and so on... in some ways the providers are doing quite well to offer the speeds that they do as compared to the loss (as a percentage) that one might experience on a similar network in a place like Australia or even NZ. Here Telecom's network is capable of 14mbit/s, but the average speedtest.net result that I've seen is about 5.5mbit/s - this is in a country with no population, so I don't imagine that there's too much congestion - so all things considered, that's quite a large loss compared to the first speedtests that were coming through when 3G was released in India (2-3mbit/s on 3.6mbit/s capable devices)...